Reflections of a Pharmacy Practice Resident

So, blogging…

Among all the other learning objectives for this year, one of mine will be learning how to verbalize all of my thoughts and reflections into this blog!

Day 1: (@VGH) It was nice to have met everyone and get a lay of the land with regards to what this year has in store for us. It was great to have a better idea of who is in charge of which portfolios, so that when issues arise we can best direct our questions.

ADS #1 – Information Systems: In the afternoon, Jason Park gave us a great talk about the ins and outs of the information systems at play throughout the LMPS sites. This was very interesting and useful talk and I found myself bookmarking and saving a lot of websites, and tips and tricks that Jason taught us. Particularly I was very enthralled by all the encryption and password protection tricks, that I was both unfamiliar with, and had never even considered as a necessity prior to this ADS. The one tip that I really took out of the ADS is to begin employing for both my professional and personal lives is a password protected and encrypted excel sheet of a list of all the usernames and passwords I’ve accumulated!

ADS #2 – Research: In the latter part of the day, Peter Loewen came to speak to us about all things related to our research project. I found this ADS to be quite eye-opening. I thought I had a decent background in research and didn’t expect to have too many questions about how to approach selecting a project. However, the points of consideration that were brought up by my colleagues were eye-opening and definitely forced me to reassess which projects peak my interest and why. Specifically I learned that the process of pulling charts can act as a rate limiting step for research projects. I learned that it is important to choose a project that is feasible for both this year, and for myself as the junior PI. For myself, I took this to mean a project that I am both passionate about, am able to work on (with some ease – e.g. proximity to the site), and one who’s PIs/preceptors are ones that I am really keen on working with and learning from. This ADS especially helped me on Day 2 when we had our first peek into the projects presented by the preceptors/PIs themselves.

Day 2: We did our orientation to BC Children’s and Women’s today. It was a great day for many reasons, but it felt more like a true site orientation for me, as I will be doing a majority of my rotations at BCCH. It was so nice to see many familiar faces (as I did my Phar 489 – undergrad hospital rotation at BCCH), but it was great to get refamiliarized with the hospital and learn tricks and tips that would have been outside of my scope as an undergrad student.